


The Hangman Isn't Hanging

by Morbane



Category: Seafort Saga - David Feintuch
Genre: Angst, Book 3: Prisoner's Hope, Character Study, Constructive Criticism Welcome, Gen, Love/Hate
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-23
Updated: 2013-12-23
Packaged: 2018-01-05 16:24:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,604
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1096076
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Morbane/pseuds/Morbane
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>An emotional arc for Edgar in <i>Prisoner's Hope</i>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Hangman Isn't Hanging

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kangeiko](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kangeiko/gifts).



I have never been hated as much by anyone in my life as I was hated by Nicholas Seafort.

At first, I am sure I didn’t deserve it. Possibly, after nearly a year of the insolence he permitted me to show, I had earned it by degrees. It would be difficult to tell the tipping point.

We were at the Academy together, separated by a year. As cadet corporal, I oversaw his conduct. Years after, when we were both officers, I would not have remembered the discipline I enforced on him – no different from that enforced by any figure appointed to the traditional position – except that he did, and held it as a grudge.

“I hated you,” he told me baldly. An awkward statement, as I’d just reported to him for duty in his new groundside position – a position as newly-cut as my orders. Hated, or hate? I wondered. The former was by definition behind us. The latter I thought I could survive. Captain Hawkins’ senior lieutenant, while I was still a middy, had had a similarly violent temper. I’d learned to let it roll over me.

I came groundside from _Portia_. I’d served on her only eight months. It had been a quiet posting. The ship, having just returned from Detour, was assigned to mainly in-system patrols, with one scientific expedition and one supply run to a sparsely populated mining moon, orbiting the second closest star to Hope Nation’s. I had no difficulty getting on with Captain Akers. He was a ponderous, reticent man of forty who weighed each decision carefully, and rarely went back on one. It was easy to anticipate his habits, which freed my mind to deal with issues among the middies or crew. Most problems that arose did so from boredom.

That ended when I received orders to work as Seafort’s aide. Doing what, I wasn’t quite sure. Most Naval men stick to ships as tightly as their suits’ magnetic boots, but in the last few months I’d seen groundside rarely. I assumed that if the fish attacked, I’d be aloft soon enough, Seafort’s general inspection cancelled.

In my first full day of working under him, he stretched the terms of “general inspection” to inspecting a General and removing the man from command.

I came to take a sort of comfort from the idea that although I couldn’t predict what he would do next, it was quite likely that neither could he.

I had trouble deciding when to take him seriously. The man’s ghastly scar – in this day and age, as much an affectation as refusing to wash dried blood from his skin – tore across his face, giving everything he said an ominous cast. Having corrected for the effect, I attempted to hear his words as if he meant them more mildly than they sounded. He was, after all, in physical pain for the entirety of my service under him. The attempt foundered; I realised that the anger was quite real: Seafort was every mote the arrogant, ornery, God-damned (no blasphemy – he believed it to be cold fact) over-reaching lunatic he represented himself as.

When, sorely afflicted, he snarled at me for my temerity in trying to keep him alive, I wondered if he even noticed his surliness. Or if – surrounded by juniors who had no choice but to endure it, miraculously surviving its effect on his superiors – he had lost any sense of how he sounded. Occasionally I was tempted to alert him. Or emulate him.

Perhaps, after the first time I saved his life, I should not have repeated the offense.

It was an impulse as quick and violent as any of his snarls. We were about to die; I shoved a Captain out of the pilot seat of his own vessel and took us down.

In the aftermath, I was not sure which of us was more shaken: I, my life forfeit, or Captain Seafort, about to confirm that fact.

Strangely, although I’d acted to save all our lives, it was clearly forefront in Seafort’s mind that I’d saved his. He saw my motive as ordered, my method as anarchy. I am not sure it could have occurred to him that I might have simply wanted to live.

Similarly, although he chose to commute my lawful punishment, he surely never considered that this gave surety to his own survival. If I’d been under sentence of death, I am not sure I would have had the will to march for days through thick vegetation, lending my waning strength to the weaker members of the party.

I hope I would have.

But that question would not have entered Seafort’s head.

“God, I despise you,” he said, in sparing me. Mercy and hate: a curdling mix.

In some ways already broken, he was inflexible. “I am the Government,” he said, and then, in a staggering act, conferred that government on the citizens of Hope Nation. I had assumed his arrogance was limited in believing himself the source of all misery in the universe; and yet also he reached infinity in the other direction, in speaking with a voice devolved from God.

A more dramatic departure from Hope Nation I could not have imagined.

So Seafort’s next insanity was the least predictable of them all.

We were helpless in the shuttle as Seafort ran about Orbit Station like a mad scientist of classic literature, somehow assisted by the Station in its own demise. We were a hopeless raft: a child, a delinquent, an invalid, a loved one, and myself; and in the face of my Captain’s obvious and explicit treason, I had no idea what to consider myself. His junior, still, since my attempt to relieve him had failed. His aide in no way, as I had no desire to abet treason. I pleaded with Captain Seafort when I could get through to him. Reacting to my frantic tone, his wife began to cry – great sobs that shook her entire frame. Terrified that she would choke in her unfamiliar spacesuit, I disobeyed Seafort’s last orders, re-airing the cabin and helping her undo her suit helmet so that she could wipe her face. It was this smaller insubordination that made me light-headed, almost tempted to giggle.

“I’ll exit in a T-suit, and jet to you,” he said.

“Your wife’s hysterical, and so am I,” I said, regaining some gravity in speaking to him. “Hurry.” I did not question the relief I felt.

The station – and Vax Holser – ended in almighty fire.

Nick Seafort doomed himself to end in ice.

Hatred seemed to displace air in the corridors of the _Victoria_ , as Captain Seafort filled the position left by the departed Holser. His officers hated; his crew hated; I hated.

Sometimes Seafort seemed unaffected. He had the arrogance to despise himself so much that popular feeling did not register, at least with his ego. It offended his sense of Naval discipline; that was the grounds on which he rebuked most of us during the course of the voyage.

Yet, we were not exactly united in our hate. Ricky Fuentes seemed to grieve the Seafort he had idolised. Steiner evinced a cold disgust occasionally mixed with incredulity. I struggled with what I felt.

The period of scrambling about on Hope Colony – by electricar, by heli, by foot, and, absurdly, by shuttle – was like a blast of sound and fury that now died away. I supposed, bleakly, that a man of Seafort’s wild impulses was destined to destroy himself. But look at how much he’d destroyed along with him. 

His shrouded presence was a heavy a thing to bear.

Exercise, often, was my solace. In the recreation room, I dialled up the run-deck to put me on a program of variable gradients, shifting the “ground” under my feet. I pondered the irony of the power that not only maintained the gravity of an imagined Earth, but also conjured up terrain. Such was the Navy’s hold over men’s imagination in God’s deeps. Such was Seafort’s hold over those who knew him. 

I knew that at times, on Hope Nation, Seafort had wished me court-martialed or worse. Now I knew that he would die at the end of our voyage. I began to be glad of it. His acts deserved death. The creeds of the Navy we served demanded no less.

Seafort had accepted my resentment since he first broke me to midshipman; this hatred, too, he accepted.

One day, when I was exiting the exercise room, he caught my eye in the corridor. My regime had failed to soothe me. Seafort gave a wry, self-mocking smile. There was a kind of relief in it; an eye in the storm of this hatred. For a moment, I imagined his face without the scar. The smile would then have been brilliant.

His broadcast when we reached Home System had the gravity of a confession to our Lord. Reeling in its aftermath, I had the sense that it had been so received.

Not his sentence, but the crime itself, had been overturned. He was guilty – but there was no punishment or punisher. 

After I had sobbed in my cabin, like a middy, or a mourner, I became aware again of relief, as if a burden had been lifted from me. Not Seafort’s death, perhaps, but the weight of having wished it on him. Oh, I did not like him, but my hate, confounded, was petty now. In believing that his death was inexorable, for a time, I had worn the executioner’s robe. 

I did not hate him as he wanted to be hated.

I did not want to.

**Author's Note:**

> Title is from Steely Dan, 'Do It Again'.
> 
> Thank you to Framlingem for the beta.


End file.
